Bourgeois Art

Small wonder that any Russian artist with integrity finds life difficult if he values his health. He has two choices: paint according to the Soviet realist standards of the Minister of Culture or paint in the privacy of his own closet.

Ilya Glazanov, 28, chose the third path and invoked the wrath of Culture Minister Mikhailov. Last year he exhibited a one-man show whose main interest point was a modest picture of his beautiful wife Nina lying nude on a bed. Man-in-the-street comments ran from "beautiful woman" to "shocking bourgeois immorality."

Glazanov, an animated young man who likens himself to a combination of icon painter and El Greco, claims no political theories. Nevertheless, political furies have forced him into hiding and denied him means of support. Fortunately, foreign ambassadors patronize him, commission him to do portraits of their families. While such patronage keeps Ilya and Nina alive, it stifles the young man as an artist.

For Glazanov, the situation seems hopeless. Recently he wrote an American friend: "I hope that only you will recognize American people with my art. It is very important for a painter. If it is possible to print it as a book, please, write me which and how many fotografyes you need." Attached to this letter was a warning from the American Embassy: any further correspondence could mean trouble for Glazanov.

Unlike Boris Pasternak's novel, Glazanov's work does not stand up to that of the West. He has had neither the benefit of training nor of example. In all probability, if he is martyred, few people will remember. And Soviet realists will continue to produce panoramas of exhuberant peasants, peasants whose pearl-like teeth bear faint resemblance to the steel variety in the mouth of Khrushchev himself.